Foodborne illness and the government shutdown

W. Nicholson Price FDA, Food Safety, Nicholson Price

By Nicholson Price

This story is still developing, so this post will just be a quick pointer.  You may have seen news stories about how FDA isn’t inspecting foods, and 90% of seafood isn’t getting inspected.  And these are all worries about problems that we think might happen.

Well, the problems have started.  Salmonella-contaminated chicken has sickened 278 people across 18 states.  The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is still operating as an excepted activity (pdf link, see page 2), and has announced the outbreak but the CDC may be unable to do interstate surveillance of the outbreak (exactly what CDC is able to do during the shutdown is a bit unclear).  And FSIS only covers meat, poultry, and eggs.  FDA, which inspects most other foods, won’t be doing so as long as the government is shut down.

And for folks who happen to go to the USDA site looking for answers (as opposed to linking right to the FSIS), they’ll get this message: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.”

W. Nicholson Price

Nicholson Price is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Previously, he taught law at the University of New Hampshire. He holds a PhD in Biological Sciences and a JD, both from Columbia, and an AB from Harvard. He clerked for Judge Carlos T. Bea on the Ninth Circuit, and was then appointed as an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard. Nicholson teaches patents and health law and studies life science innovation, including big data and artificial intelligence in medicine. He recommends reading Bujold, Jemisin, and Older. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, the Michigan Law Review, and elsewhere. Nicholson is cofounder of Regulation and Innovation in the Biosciences, co-chair of the Junior IP Scholars Association, and a Core Partner at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law.

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